source: The Irish Times
The professor of evolutionary
genetics at Trinity College Dublin on the passion and breakthroughs
that have driven her career so far, and doing something ’interesting and
meaningful’ in her new role as Government science adviser
Aoife McLysaght recalls how she heard about her first job in genetics. It was the summer after second year in Trinity College Dublin,
and she was working in her father’s wholesale nursery in Blackrock, Co
Dublin. “Everybody worked there, including me”, starting with filling
pots with soil from an early age. “I remember my sister running out into
the nursery and going, ‘There’s some professor on the phone for you’.”
McLysaght had apparently impressed genetics professor David McConnell in
a problem-solving exam, and he offered her a summer research job.
Turned
out this involved learning about, then designing, a bioinformatics
course, using computers to analyse biological information, then a new
field. “It became the thing I ended up really loving and working in,
basically computational biology.” She’s now evolutionary genetics
professor at Trinity.
But what
tickles her, “the mental connection”, is that that day when her sister
ran out, “I was sowing sweet pea”. Peas are critical to genetics. By
crossing pea plants, the Austrian scientist Gregor Mendel “basically
figured out what genes are, how things are inherited”. While “you can’t
unmix paint”, red-flowered and white-flowered parent plants can beget
pink, red or white flowers.
This week, ahead of today’s International Women’s Day, An Post launched
two new stamps to acknowledge the achievements of women in Stem
(science, technology, engineering and maths) and the challenges they
face. One features McLysaght; the other has astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell
Burnell.
In January, McLysaght started her new job
as Government science adviser. New science advice structures,
department-based – Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation
and Science – for the first time, will inform responses to complex and
challenging policy issues. It’s a “60 per cent secondment” from Trinity,
where she’ll pause teaching and administration but continue research.
She’s led a research team there since 2003, managing €5.5m-plus budgets.
As a student in 2001 she was part of the international consortium
publishing the draft human genome sequence; she was first discovering
novel human-specific genes in 2009, identified links between gene
duplication patterns and human disease, and has significantly
contributed to our understanding of genomes.
Based
at the department three days a week, at assistant secretary general
level, she’s assembling a new national science advice forum of experts
to provide advice.
Continuing research is important (or “you
lose momentum, you lose touch with the field”) and the 60/40 split is
considered a good model for government science advisers, so “you retain
your independence. You don’t become a civil servant who’s interested in
promotion. You’re not in any way incentivised to please the people
around you.”
Today we’re sitting by
the fireplace of Trinity’s gracious Common Room. She gestures to ”Liz”
looking down; a portrait of England’s Elizabeth I. This university is
her turf since she was an undergrad (graduating in genetics in 1998, PhD
in 2002), aside from a postdoc in University of California, Irvine.
She’s
full of knowledge and enthusiasm, humorous, easy, insightful, likable.
She laughs a lot. “I’m the one who never left college.” She grins.
Arriving in Trinity, “I felt very quickly I’d found my place”. Genetics’
department culture was and is “very supportive and welcoming of
students. We were just treated as people who were earlier in their
career. You’d have these really good interactions and conversations with
the professors. That’s very motivating.” She describes professors,
undergrads, post-grads and post-docs mixing in the building’s atrium,
eating lunch, chatting.
International
science adviser counterparts tell her “the relationships are so
important”. She observes “as a scientist or an academic, you might think
you’re going to convince people because of this amazing data. You’ll
just whip out a graph, and they’ll go, ‘wow, now I see it’. But
actually, what’s more likely is you’ll convince them because they trust
you”.
Having a foot in both civil
service and academia is interesting for her. As an academic she’s hired
for “the knowledge and discretion and insight to choose” what to teach
or research. “In academia, the huge privilege we have is to follow your
curiosity.” Civil service involves more procedures “for very, very good
reasons”. In this new world, “I’m sitting in on management meetings,
business planning meetings, and I’m constantly impressed by the amazing
people around me” with vast knowledge, and “very good at knowing how to
be effective in getting something done, at reading people, picking up on
the slightest things, that I was in the room for but didn’t notice”.
The
department’s new unit comprises McLysaght and a principal officer.
“He’s like my subtitles in every conversation. He’s helping so much in
figuring out how to structure things.
“I took on this job because I want to do
something interesting and meaningful with it, not because I needed to
fill my time. I had a full-time job, which I really enjoy. The first
line of my application was: I love my job.”
A vaccine for cancer. That’s amazing. That some people try to undermine that is depressing
Her
paternal grandfather, genealogist Edward MacLysaght, died aged 99 when
she was 10. She recalls him sitting in the garden, “his beautiful
books”, the photo of him with de Valera on the mantelpiece, and his
trick holding a coin between his eyebrow and cheek (“we’d roar
laughing”). Her grandparents lived in “a little house, basically up the
back of the garden in Blackrock” and a relative, barrister Charles
Lysaght, told them he’d died, then “rang The Irish Times and RTÉ.
Minutes later I heard it on radio. I thought this was normal.”
Theirs
was not a science family. “I never knew a scientist. I didn’t know you
could be a scientist.” But it was her favourite school subject, fuelled
by teacher Nick Frewin at Andrew’s in Booterstown. Looking back, she
realises, within “the rather constrained Leaving Cert curriculum, he
managed to emulate one of the joys of science, which is figuring things
out.” She enjoyed genetics, because it involved “understanding
principles and figuring things out, rather than remembering stuff.
Labelling the parts of the eye. That’s just dull. Genetics was exciting,
because it was about ideas and concepts.”
She
worried about jobs. “My mum just said, do what you love and the job
will follow. Which is very optimistic advice, isn’t it, and very brave
advice.”
These days, talking to school
groups, especially girls, “I’m not in the business of persuading
anybody to do something they don’t want to do. Science worked for me. It
doesn’t mean it’ll work for somebody else. All I want to do is let
people know the door is open, if they care to walk through it. That’s
all I needed.”
There’s a perception
she was young to be appointed full professor in 2020. But she was 44,
“older than many of my male colleagues”. She was, however, youngish
becoming assistant professor at 27; she laughs about managing “to
straddle that ambiguity of, is she a student or staff?”.
She spells out the startling drop-off of
women before reaching academia’s higher levels. Biology doesn’t have the
“systemic stereotyping” of maths, but even there, while women comprise
50 per cent of undergraduates right up to postdoctoral research, getting
top grades, the percentage of women drops as soon as you get “steady
conditions, no longer precarious employment”. She says “too many people
thought it was a legacy problem that would fix itself over time. They
were kind of passive about it.”
She
married in her 20s, had her first child at 28, within a year of
assistant-professorship, “when I should have been knuckling down and
impressing everybody! I didn’t do the correct career thing.” She laughs.
“I don’t know if I’d call it a gamble, but I decided, my life decisions
and career decisions are separate.” It helped that academic careers are
“judged in the round. Are you getting your job done? You organise your
own time”.
As science adviser, “I
don’t want to give the impression I think nobody uses evidence and I’m
coming in to save the day.” But she foresees “smaller cultural shifts”
in better integrating evidence into decision-making, making it “more
habitual”.
Climate change
has “the most urgency, and the longer we leave it untackled, the more
urgent and bigger the challenge.” It’s cross-government: “it’s energy,
agriculture, transport, skills and education. All infrastructure.”
McLysaght
is fascinating company, knowledgeable beyond her speciality and about
the bigger picture. She chats away, fired up. “I can keep you here for
10 hours, if you have the time!” We’ve moved and are looking out over
Trinity’s Front Square. She talks about her “fortuitous” involvement in
the genome project, how “we knew it was something momentous, we were
part of the team that was analysing the human genome first”, and the
significance of discovering genome duplication in human ancestors 500
million years ago, thus creating “this extra capacity for enormous
diversity” and with implications for human health.
McLysaght stresses “scientists are human beings. Of course we can make
mistakes. People think scientists know everything. Of course we don’t.
We just know a lot about a very narrow thing. People think science is
fixed, never changes, but actually we’re always updating it”, what a
friend calls “trying to be less wrong than yesterday”.
And while scientists can have “reasonable
and plausible disagreement”, when there isn’t 100 per cent certainty on
detail, “we know the extent of our uncertainty”, and there are
“discussions and disagreements, constantly moving closer to the truth.
You can categorically say, this is untrue, while not being 100 per cent
certain of something else within that.” While this concept can be
confusing, it’s important for trust in, and public understanding of,
science, she says.
The false assertion
that vaccines cause autism is a good example. “It’s been thoroughly
investigated. It is absolutely not true, thoroughly debunked.” But it
“created mistrust in vaccines, which have been extraordinarily powerful
in eliminating and controlling very significant childhood diseases.”
Australia has eradicated cervical cancer because of HPV uptake. “A
vaccine for cancer. That’s amazing. That some people try to undermine
that is depressing.”
Talking about science is important, she
says, “so people understand how we know things, and what you do when
you’re trying to develop new scientific knowledge. You don’t just build
something and hope it works. There’s steps and investigation along the
way. We are our own first critics. When I’m trying to demonstrate
something, the first thing I try to do is disprove it.
“What
I’m interested in is that things work well, that science is valued as
part of decision-making. What I’m not interested in is any kind of
personal recognition. It’s more important to me that this thing is done
and done well, than anybody getting credit for it. I don’t think I have a
big ego. Maybe everybody does somewhat, but it’s not what motivates
me.”
